New Critical Perspectives on the 'Trace'

Organising Committee

Nieves Pascual

She has researched into the relationship between medicine and literature, more particularly the translation of pain
into language, the effects of autobiography on the trauma of voluntary hunger and the ways hunger infects our stories. She has
published essays and organized seminars related to these issues. More recently she has shown an interest in food studies and the
ways food helps recover, discover and cover personal and collective memories. Her contribution to this project and the conference
organized at the University of Malaga are in line with these two venues of research.

Marta Cerezo Moreno

“El concepto de la huella: delimitación, estudio y aplicación a la literatura reciente en lengua inglesa” will intend to analyse
the concept of 'the trace' in order to construct a theoretical frame to be applied to contemporary English narrative. My study
will be inserted within the so-called Disability Studies in direct relation to Gender Studies. I will look into the ways Ricoeur's
different types of trace (written trace, the trace of the soul, and the physical and mental trace) can be also considered as
imprints left by disability/gender and into their different narrative potrayals as realities shaped by cultural and social
discourses in contemporary English novels.

Rosario Arias

She focuses on the renewed interest in the concept of the ‘trace’ in recent criticism and considers how this
notion provides ample space to explore contemporary interventions into the (Victorian) past. She intends to conceptualise
the ways in which the presence of past cultures is perceived in contemporary literature written in English, by means of
vestiges and visible marks, from a phenomenological point of view. Based on her previous work on the spectre and spectrality,
Arias’ research revolves around the question of (in)visibility and presence of past in current literature.

Carmen Lara-Rallo

She is a doctoral assistant lecturer in English at the University of Málaga. She has presented papers at
several international conferences, and has published books, book chapters, and articles on different aspects of Anglo-American
literature and criticism. Her main areas of interest include contemporary British fiction and comparative literature, and she
is currently working on the critical concept of the ‘Trace’, and on the dialogue between literature and other arts and disciplines
such as painting, music, and science.

Lin Elinor Pettersson

She is a member of the Department of English, French and German at the University of Málaga where she c
ompleted her MA degree in English Studies in 2010. Her MA thesis, entitled On- and Off-Stage Performance of Gender in
Neo-Victorian Fiction, was carried out under the supervision of Dr. Rosario Arias Doblas. Lin’s main research lines
are neo-Victorian literature, gender and performativity in the context of the nineteenth-century culture of spectacle.
She is at the moment working on her PhD with a research grant funded by “La Junta de Andalucía”.

Lea Heiberg Madsen

She holds a BA in English Philology and completed a Masters Degree in English Studies at the University of Malaga
in September 2009. She recently received a research grant to take a PhD and is currently working on her doctoral thesis, titled:
Medicine and the Female Gothic in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Her research interests include neo-Victorian literature, focusing
especially on social concerns and representations of female corporality and marginality.

Martyna Bryla

She holds an MA in English Philology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland and an MA in English Studies
from the University of Málaga in Spain. She is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Málaga.
Her primary research interest is in the relationship between Jewish-American, or American-Jewish fiction of Philip Roth and
Eastern-European literature. She works as a research assistant at the Department of Computer Science at the University of
Málaga.